Auld Licht Idylls | Page 4

left. I do not lock the schoolhouse door at nights; for even a
highwayman (there is no such luck) would be received with open arms,
and I doubt if there be a barred door in all the glen. But it is cosier to
put on the shutters. The road to Thrums has lost itself miles down the
valley. I wonder what they are doing out in the world. Though I am the
Free Church precentor in Thrums (ten pounds a year, and the little town
is five miles away), they have not seen me for three weeks. A packman
whom I thawed yesterday at my kitchen fire tells me, that last Sabbath
only the Auld Lichts held service. Other people realized that they were
snowed up. Far up the glen, after it twists out of view, a manse and half
a dozen thatched cottages that are there may still show a candle light,
and the crumbling gravestones keep cold vigil round the grey old kirk.
Heavy shadows fade into the sky to the north. A flake trembles against
the window; but it is too cold for much snow to-night. The shutter bars
the outer world from the schoolhouse.
CHAPTER II
THRUMS
Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled
together in a cup, which is the town nearest the schoolhouse. Until
twenty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing the
rafters overhead, had a handloom, and hundreds of weavers lived and
died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it. In those days the
cup overflowed and left several houses on the top of the hill, where
their cold skeletons still stand. The road that climbs from the square,
which is Thrums's heart, to the north is so steep and straight, that in a
sharp frost children hunker at the top and are blown down with a roar

and a rush on rails of ice. At such times, when viewed from the
cemetery where the traveller from the schoolhouse gets his first
glimpse of the little town, Thrums is but two church steeples and a
dozen red stone patches standing out of a snow-heap. One of the
steeples belongs to the new Free Kirk, and the other to the parish
church, both of which the first Auld Licht minister I knew ran past
when he had not time to avoid them by taking a back wynd. He was but
a pocket edition of a man, who grew two inches after he was called; but
he was so full of the cure of souls, that he usually scudded to it with his
coattails quarrelling behind him. His successor, whom I knew better,
was a greater scholar, and said, "Let us see what this is in the original
Greek," as an ordinary man might invite a friend to dinner; but he never
wrestled as Mr. Dishart, his successor, did with the pulpit cushions, nor
flung himself at the pulpit door. Nor was he so "hard on the Book," as
Lang Tammas, the precentor, expressed it, meaning that he did not
bang the Bible with his fist as much as might have been wished.
Thrums had been known to me for years before I succeeded the
captious dominie at the schoolhouse in the glen. The dear old soul who
originally induced me to enter the Auld Licht kirk by lamenting the
"want of Christ" in the minister's discourses was my first landlady. For
the last ten years of her life she was bedridden, and only her interest in
the kirk kept her alive. Her case against the minister was that he did not
call to denounce her sufficiently often for her sins, her pleasure being to
hear him bewailing her on his knees as one who was probably past
praying for. She was as sweet and pure a woman as I ever knew, and
had her wishes been horses, she would have sold them and kept (and
looked after) a minister herself.
There are few Auld Licht communities in Scotland nowadays--perhaps
because people are now so well off, for the most devout Auld Lichts
were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim struggle
with the workhouse. Many a heavy-eyed, back-bent weaver has won
his Waterloo in Thrums fighting on his stumps. There are a score or
two of them left still, for, though there are now two factories in the
town, the clatter of the handloom can yet be heard, and they have been
starving themselves of late until they have saved up enough money to

get another minister.
The square is packed away in the centre of Thrums, and irregularly
built little houses squeeze close to it like chickens clustering round a
hen. Once the Auld Lichts held property in the square, but other
denominations